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You can even select a column of text, then copy and paste it. What you
cannot reliably do, except in the simplest and most consistent of tables,
is export the contents of a page as a _table_ in the sense of something
Excel or Access can understand as a table, which is what Jim's original
question was.

For those who aren't familiar with it, I think Dick is referring to the
Table Select tool in full-version Acrobat. For simple tables, at least, it
will copy table-formatted text, and allow you to paste it directly into
Word as a table or into Excel in formatted columns.

Unfortunately, if you have a multi-page table, it seems that you have to
select each page separately (someone please correct me if this is wrong,
but I couldn't get it to work). In Jim's case, that would mean selecting
and copying each of his hundreds of pages individually, so this isn't a
quick fix. Then again, reformatting hundreds of pages into tables isnn't
exactly zippy, either.

Also, as Dick mentioned, it can't handle all tables. I tried it on a table
with complex formatting and just got a mess. However, if you have simple
formatting and contents, it can be a good solution to getting table data
out of a PDF.